Ayi Cooks Dinner

Ayi made us our first home-cooked meal last night.  It was, in short, plentiful and delicious.  Even more rewarding, though, was actually going the market for all of the ingredients and having them cooked up as soon as we got home.  It's so easy to forget how distant many of us have become from the food we eat.  In just a few short decades, the custom of going daily to the fresh market has been all but totally lost. 

Ayi brought us to a local market hidden away on a side street in our neighborhood.  She's no Coupon Suzy, but a bargain hunter nonetheless... one of her most frequent topics of conversation is the relative price of a jin of garlic (斤, about .5 kg).  Being a migrant from rural Henan province, she can hardly be blamed for it.  I once asked her how to say Kim Jong-Il in Chinese, but she responded that she did not know who that was, so we went back to talking about garlic. 

In any event, the fruits and vegetables at the market were strewn across tables and and in baskets under makeshift tents along the road.  Even there, you have to shop around to save that last kuai or two (块, like "bucks," a measure word for money). In all, 3 eggplants, 2 large tomatoes, a bunch of broccoli, Chinese scallions, 5 pears, a bag of snow peas and a bag of hot peppers cost us just over $2.  The eggs and meat we bought at the supermarket, for obvious reasons. 

At home,  I took down the recipe as Ayi washed and cooked the food.  Chinese is famous for its plethora of very specific verbs, so I learned quite a lot as she sliced, diced and chopped -- hopefully I'll be able to replicate these delicious meals when I get home.

I joked as she mixed the fried tomatoes and eggs in the wok, "Wow, I'm not even doing anything and I'm tired..."  But the reality is: learning is exhausting.  I sat down to a feast -- eggplant and pork, spicy snow peas, broccoli and garlic sauce, fresh cucumbers in a sour sauce, and the best fried tomatoes and eggs I've ever had.